Durable/serious arm hardware ?

[Ian Lepore]

On Sun, 2017-01-22 at 11:19 +0100, nowhere wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I'd like to hear from the most skilled of you, if anybody knows
> serious 
> arm based hardware or share this though : I'm becoming convinced
> that 
> theses hardware (arm based) are just the consumable-smartphone
> fashion 
> counterpart for kids and leisures or tests. Not really final and 
> carefully finished products; abble to works for years or a decade;
> doing 
> is job in a office corner, being forgotten  by anyone, like some of
> my 
> older freebsd servers wich are running for a decade now.
> 
> 
> Those past years, I've bought 3 arm based devices :
> 
> 1 raspberry-pi , which was affected by the "micron-ram-chip" bug:
> except 
> with debian, it never booted on freebsd (I even tried netbsd): I
> just 
> trashed it yesterday (bought in 2014 i think).
> 
> 1 Beagleboneblack : works fine for weeks then freeze suddenly. And 
> sometimes did not event reboot (*): had to loop-reset it until boot 
> process go to the end. Seem the most "workable" product so far..
> (bought 
> in 2015)
> 
> 1 olimex a20-lime2-emmc: my most recent buy. It did not event boot
> with 
> network with it's own debian sd card... (I did not yet take time to
> make 
> it's own freebsd sd card): (bought in 2016-07).
> 
> My goals, for example, with theses boards were to give some of my
> nomads 
> customers, a box with an autonomous dhcp/dns/vpn server on theyr 
> networks, without the need to change anything else than disabling
> their 
> dhcp servers for instance : I think a Quad xeon racked server is a
> bit 
> too much for theses tasks; I was using pfsence on pcengines boards 
> before to do this kind of things.
> 
> Since my conclusions are based only on theses 3 boards, I'd like to
> hear 
> from thoses of you who works daily with these boards, and thoses
> opinion 
> are based on far more than my hand counted experiences.
> 
> 
> PM.
> 
> 
> 
> (*) I work with a 5V/5A (25w) psu: that's not an overloaded psu
> problem; 
> Not a damaged emmc/sd card problem too: all my systems are 
> read-only-root based: seems to really be an hardware issue.
> 

At $work we create commercial products running freebsd that have a 10
to 20 year (depending on the product) g'teed lifespan in the field.  We
used to use Atmel arm chips on custom-designed mainboards.  Now we use
primarily imx6 SOM modules from Technexion, SolidRun, and soon Boundary
Devices, along with our own custom-designed carrier boards.  The imx6
SOM modules are a bit higher-end than rpi or beaglebone boards.

I would say that basically you have to shop around a bit.  If you buy
ultra-cheap hobbyist hardware such as an rpi, you're going to get what
you pay for.  If you buy the higher-end hardware you can expect the
same kind of quality and lifespan you'd get from x86 hardware (which
doesn't tend to target the hobbyist market so much).

-- Ian